Veritas Volume Manager - SDS is free, why should I use Veritas

[630111]

Not trashing Veritas, but want to know. Is there a performance advantage to using Veritas over Solaris Disk Suite? Stories of personal experience and links to any articles on the internet comparing the two would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[naggiman]

We use both ODS and VxVM/VxFS.

As ODS is developed it is getting closer to VxVM functionality such that there is very little different between the two. The only major difference left is that using VxFS you can shrink FS's as well as grow them.

We use VxVM/VxFS on our live oracle and web servers, but ODS everywhere else.

Latest versions of VxVM/VxFS allow for snapshotting volumes, but you can do this in ODS with adding a mirror, syncing, and splitting off the mirror. snapshotting just does all this for you. VxVM wins over ease of use i would say, however.

As for performance, it is swings and roundabouts for what you want; speed or resilience. VxVM is possibly slightly better, but i don't think there is that much in it. I am sure other people will argue, however ;o)

One other difference would be the number of partitions you can have; until ODS in Sol 9 you were limited to the number of slices you could use, but again that limit has now been removed.

N.

 

[julianbarnett]

If you want to cluster servers or have a fast failover mechanism, Veritas' abiity to deport disk groups on one server and import on another is very handy. Also includes Dynamic Multipathing for resilient paths to disks. Veritas can be somewhat obscure in the way it encapsulates and mirrors root disks.